TL;DR: is there an app that can alert me when a new version of some other app is available?
I have about 12 - 15 services (freshrss, heimdall, photoprism, Wordpress, etc) running using docker compose spread across 4 hosts. Through my self-hosting journey I’ve been burned a few times using “latest” images so I now pin app image versions within compose.
The problem then becomes that every couple of weeks, I have to go out to different GitHub’s, docker hub, etc. to see if a new update for that service is available. It gets a bit tedious with 12-15 services every couple of weeks so I need a centralized and more efficient way of “keeping up”.
Is there some type of app that can track whether an app/service has a new version available? Ideally it can send me some type of notification, self-hostable, and ideally not Portainer?
GitHub has the option of emailing you on releases etc. by email.
You can also hook it to RSS https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7353538/setting-up-a-github-commit-rss-feed
Yeah, depending on the branch I’ve found that method not to be too reliable. openrss offers branches for RSS feeds for commits on every branch though: e.g. https://openrss.org/github.com/octokit/octokit.rb/commits/main
Simple solution. I like it! Although I think it will get lost in the sea of daily emails….
I just subscribe with RSS to the releases page on github of each project
This sounds like the simplest and most effective solution. Thanks!
Thanks!
If im doing this right, the url is just the releases page for the repo with a .atom at the end. So for Vaultwarden it is https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/releases.atom
RSS feeds
Love that username tho!! Yeah might just do RSS. I already run FreshRSS and it’s ability to filter stuff would probably come in handy too
Argus https://release-argus.io
This looks interesting too
I use renovate myself. Via a cron job against a self hosted gitea instance.
https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate
Works for many dependency types including docker images. You can also have it pin non version tags (using digests).
Watchtower will automatically update docker containers.
That will just pull the latest image though right? I.e., if you explicitly have a container on a tag for v1.2.3, it wouldn’t upgrade you when v1.2.4 is released right?
Yes, but I believe it can be configured for notifications as well, I just never needed that.
No, I mean doesn’t it only look for updates of the current tag? That works fine if you set every container to the “latest” tag, but if you set your containers to specific version tags then you won’t get a notification unless that specific tag gets updated.
Check out WhatsupDocker. I use the same to inform me of updates. It is self-hostable as well. I then use the WUD widget for homepage to let me know that there’s an update available on my dashboard
If you have your compose files in git, you might be able to use renovate to send you pull requests with image updates. I’ve done something similar with kubernetes but I think it supports docker compose too. You might need some kind of automation on your hosts to keep things in sync.
I use diun and rss feeds. So far I’ve had different levels of success with different services.
For example for Immich the RSS is a lot more useful because it lets you know when you need to run manual steps.
